THE wrecks of as many as 400 ships lost off the North-East coast are to be found, mapped and brought back to life as part of a major lottery-funded project.

Hundreds of shipwrecks are believed to litter the seabed off the coast of County Durham, many of them dating to the 19th Century when overloaded colliers carried coal from the region’s pits to London and beyond.

Now work is underway to chart the sunken vessels as part of the six-year Seascape scheme, a £5 million project to deliver over 30 coastal projects from South Shields to Teesmouth.

Among the high-profile projects are plans to locate as many of the wrecks as possible, with research already underway using historic records and reports from the region’s fishermen.

In around 18 months, a boat equipped with surface sonar equipment will begin logging the vessels on the seabed and creating three-dimensional scans, which can be used to bring the lost ships back to life through virtual reality modelling.

Niall Benson, Heritage Coast Partnership officer, said they were aware of evidence of between 300 and 400 wrecks, mostly dating to the time when the East Coast Channel was one of the busiest waterways in the world.

“We don’t know the precise location of all of them, because they went down a long time ago, but we will be looking at some of those wrecks.

“We want to find them, identify them and find the stories of the people who were on board.

“We may find some tremendous stories, we may find some ordinary stories, but we want to bring those wrecks back to life”.

Much of the County Durham coastline is made up of soft rock, which means the seawater carries a lot of sediment and visibility underwater is poor.

It also means that the seabed is largely featureless mud and sands, making the wrecks an important habitat for marine life.

Surveys will be carried out around 300ft down to the seabed and around six nautical miles out from the coast.

As well as the Victorian collier vessels, the team hope to find ships from the First and Second World Wars, when coal was shipped down the coast in convoys, guarded by protection vessels, for the war effort.

Mr Benson said: “Most of the wrecks are from the 19th or 20th Century when our industry was at its height, a lot of them were colliers which were badly loaded and went over in bad weather.

“In the First World War, the East Coast Channels were really important in terms of supplying the western front and there were huge convoys.

“We do know one or two specific cases which have had a bit of work done on them.

“Vessels from the fishing fleet carried out minesweeping during the First and Second World Wars.

“It was a very dangerous job: people lost their lives and their stories haven’t really been told”.